


Lighting up Fires With Our Torch Songs

by missingmymothership



Series: Born in the City [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bisexual Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Multi, SHUSH, Substance Abuse, art fic, i like my art headcanons, yes i know Sammy can't draw I don't care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 11:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3528086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missingmymothership/pseuds/missingmymothership
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam pretends he is not an artist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sam is sixteen when he realizes he has a future. He is sixteen when he realizes that he can actually fucking be someone in the world, that he can color outside his father’s dark-ink lines. There are no limits to what he can do; he’s got his life ahead of him.

And instead of giving him wings, it tears him apart from the inside. 

It’s not his father that he’s worried about. It’s Dean.

Sam is sixteen when he has to write an essay about the person in his life that he looks up to the most. He lies, bullshits most of the essay, gets a 98. Dean congratulates him and hides his disappointment behind dead eyes; it wasn’t him that Sam wrote about. They’d been dead for a while, though. Sam is used to looking at them, the eyes that look at you and see a ghost. You see enough bodies, see enough pain, you start to cauterize from the inside out. Anger is the only thing that keeps his wounds bleeding nowadays.

He takes an art class his second semester, in a school halfway across the country and colder than Arizona was. The paints don’t respond well to the faulty heating and so Sam uses pastels instead. The teachers don’t say much to him but his art disturbs them. It is beautiful and macabre and the gore practically drips off the page.

Of course, he doesn’t bring the stuff home with him. He pretends he can’t draw and eventually they leave, like they always do.

His work wins awards. Sam is not there to see them.

He fucks a girl for the first time in the back of her dad’s truck. It is completely unremarkable and only sometimes does he feel like he deserved more.

Sometimes he’ll perch on the back of the Impala and fantasize about slashing the tires, scratching up the perfect paint and taking a hammer to the engine. His daydreams always end with him running away to something better.

If only.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam shouldn't want to keep things.

He leaves Minnesota in the middle of second semester, abruptly as he started and twice as violent. Dean is white-knuckling the steering wheel and Sam has three gauze pads and a T-shirt over his father’s leg. All standard fare, really. He can’t even bring his heart to speed up.

They don’t go to the ER--both brothers take turns driving and stitching up their father, switching when their hands shake too badly or their feet get stiff on the accelerator. Sam doesn’t have a license yet. Nobody bothered. He doubts it really matters.

In a motel room a month later, Sam walks in on John passed out drunk in a puddle of his own piss. He leaves before the stench hits his nose.

On thinking about his flight afterwards, he guesses Dean will be the one cleaning it up. He tries to muster up some sympathy, and takes another bite of his burger. The buzzing fluorescent lights in the McDonalds make his hands look skeletal; he bases a drawing off of that and shows it to nobody. The school he attends now doesn’t have an art program, not really, but they have an overlarge counseling department.

He gets a five-finger discount on a tiny sketchbook and a good inking pen by utilizing his baggy sweatshirt and a charming smile. Dean always teases him about the dimples that collect in his cheeks, but they do make the old ladies at the checkout counters a hell of a lot less suspicious.

The next drawing he does is one of sharp contrast, of black blood and white, frightened eyes, and the highlights on intestines that you can only really get right once you’ve seen them up close. He thinks maybe lifting the sketchbook was a bad idea.

It makes him want to keep the things he makes.

They put Michigan in their rearview mirror while John snores in the passenger seat. The seatbacks hurt Sam’s knees, but he doesn’t mind. At least he can tell he’s not numb anymore.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He breaks a mirror and leaves it as a monument.

Summer gives him too much time to think, too much time to feel like his ribcage is splitting and impaling his lungs. He stops coming back to the room when John leaves on another hunt, drinks in the woods with people he might’ve counted as friends earlier in his life. God, he was naive back then. But. It’s the present now.

He takes a train to the city with fire burning in his brain and cocaine buried in his sinuses, squats in an apartment without a second thought. By the end of the first week, he’s falling asleep next to a dog the color of his brother’s hair.

It doesn’t help the bags under his eyes. Neither do the lights outside or the mirror he broke in the bathroom. He still hasn’t cleaned up the blood, and he keeps the door closed to keep his pet from getting hurt.

Sam wants the grimy bathroom to stay a monument to him--the one permanent piece of evidence that he _exists_ , that someone might find him someday and help him tear out of his skin. He wants to break from his bones and emerge as someone new.

Dean finds him before he can start.

On the way home, to the mingling, tinny sound of Zeppelin and his brother’s voice, he realizes he’s two months past his birthday and he couldn’t care less.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam applies to college.

He prays like Pastor Jim taught him when he starts his college applications. Dean is God-knows-where with his hand up someone’s skirt and his father is sleeping in the Impala. Too many fights meant Sam got the warm bed and John took the vinyl of the car; apparently it’s supposed to make him feel guilty.

Passive-aggressive sonofabitch.

There’s a gash in his arm that he really should stitch up. The blood’s soaking his thickest shirt.

He doodles in the margins of his essay drafts and comes up with his father’s face, decaying and contorted with rage, his brother’s calloused hands, the vampire they put down last week. Sam draws his bones and wants to feel them crack, wants the marrow to drip and wants--

He doesn’t know what he wants. Except to get out of this hellhole.

Open his body and fly free as something new.

He’s fucking exhausted when Dean gets in, reeking of sex and anxiety, and he’s sure his brother knows about the applications. For a brief moment, he wishes Dean’d stop him. Yell. Rip up the essays. Do something that’s not dropping into bed and shutting off the lamp and letting the sounds of the street and the crickets overwhelm Sam in the dark because it’s hard to not focus on the sound when you can’t see.

He lies in the dark, twitching and ripping at the sheets. His thumb is broken by morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Keep up with my crazy at lamby-grahamy.tumblr.com, or if you're (rightly) terrified of that blue hell, you can find me as Salamanderq on deviantART.


End file.
